Today would have been the 119th birthday of my grandmother, Beatrice Gresley Berg.

The. youngest of four children of a drayman, Berndt Oleson, who’d emigrated from Graesli, Norway in the 1890s, she was born in the suburbs of Thief River Falls, MN, before moving up to Middle River. She grew up speaking Norwegian until she was 8. I always regretted the fact that second generation immigrants were so adamant about not passing on the language to their kids and grandkids – until I started learning Norwegian a few years ago, and realized Berndt’s hill-country dialect was to Norway what an Appalachian brogue is to the modern US, and I probably dodged a sociolinguistic bullet.

Other than being my grandmother, and my dad’s mom, Grandma Bea was most famous – sort of – for her involvement in one famous photo.

Bea had two aunts on her mother’s side, a couple of entrepreneurs who’d traveled the wilds of Minnesota and the Dakotas. starting photography studios all over the place and selling them off to new photogs. Some of those studios still exist. One that doesn’t, but has lived on in Minnesota lore, was the Eric Enstrom studio in Bovey – a stone’s throw from Coleraine. Grandma apprenticed with Enstrom, and one day in the early ’20s was involved in the staging, shooting, development and hand-coloring of this photo:

“Grace” went on to a place on the wall of nearly every dining room in the Upper Midwest. It made Enstrom famous (mostly posthumously), made Bovey at least something of a destination, and became the “Minnesota State Painting”, as Tim Pawlenty described it to me before I gave him the entire history.

She went on to answer an ad for an assistant at a new studio in Jamestown, North Dakota, where she eventually married the boss and had my father. Grandpa Oscar died in 1942, and Bea kept the studio going by herself for a few more decades.

I’ve often wished the three of them, Bea and her two photo tycoon aunts, could have a word with today’s “feminists”, none of whom could have carried Grandma or her aunt’s camera cases.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Thursday, February 2nd, 2023 at 7:25 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.